First-row seats at the celebrity circus
Outtakes From a Marriage
By Ann Leary
Shaye Areheart, 272 pp., $23
The House at Midnight
By Lucie Whitehouse
Ballantine, 320 pp., $25
The Tenth Gift
By Jane Johnson
Crown, 390 pp., $25.95
These three first novels make use of their authors' experiences in interesting, and quite different, ways.
Ann Leary's "Outtakes From a Marriage" is a sly domestic comedy with a razor edge. The author has a keen eye for the excesses of the rich and famous, a subject with which she must be familiar as the wife of actorcomedian Denis Leary. Her experience as a bystander at the celebrity circus serves her well in this engaging variation on the old theme of marital infidelity.
Narrator Julia Ferraro's husband, Joe, has been nominated for a Golden Globe for best actor in a television series. The Ferraros have come a long way from the early days of their marriage, when she was an aspiring music journalist and he a dorky drama student. They now live in a spacious Upper West Side apartment, and their children attend private schools. Their marriage seems just about perfect until one night Julia uses Joe's phone to check her messages, accidentally punches in his code, and hears a sexy voice - "that fresh, foul purr" - leaving an intimate voice-mail for her husband. The message knocks Julia's world sideways. She becomes obsessed with finding out if Joe is having an affair with the mystery woman on the phone. She begins to question everything about her life: her looks, her parenting skills, her abandoned writing career. Readers hoping for titillating insights into the Leary marriage will draw their own conclusions, but "Outtakes From a Marriage" is fiction, and nicely done.
Lucie Whitehouse's first novel, "The House at Midnight," comes bearing enthusiastic blurbs attesting to its "stunning" Gothic qualities and enthralling atmosphere. One reviewer compares Whitehouse with Donna Tartt. The book is a page-turner, diverting summer reading, but it never quite lives up to those promises. Whitehouse writes self-consciously, tossing in classical references and carefully wrought similes. Instead of suggesting the presence of evil, she spells it out.
The house of the title is Stoneborough Manor, a "Cotswold stone pile." As the novel opens, the narrator, Joanna, and friends Martha and Danny are about to arrive at Stoneborough, recently inherited by another friend, Lucas, after the suicide of his art-dealer uncle, Patrick. The four, now approaching 30, knew one another at Oxford. They are joined by two more university friends, Michael and Rachel, and Rachel's new boyfriend, Greg. They are all making their ways in various careers - journalism, law, advertising, fashion - but this group of friends remains at the center of their lives. Lucas wants them to use Stoneborough as a refuge, a place where they can all get together away from the pressures of the city. It doesn't work out that way. After Lucas declares his longstanding love for Joanna, Danny accuses her of wanting Lucas only for his money. When Danny's employer fires him, Danny persuades Lucas to quit his job too. The two move into Stoneborough full-time to work on creative projects. Lucas becomes obsessed with some old films of his uncle, his mother, and his father, who disappeared mysteriously when Lucas was a child. Just what was going on among them? A painting in the house holds a clue. Ugly secrets from the past are revealed, with tragic results.
British publishing executive Jane Johnson's historical romance, "The Tenth Gift," was inspired by a family legend about an ancestor, a young girl kidnapped by Barbary corsairs from a Cornwall village in the early 1600s and sold into slavery in Morocco. In the 17th century, Muslims were driven out of Spain; some turned to piracy and raided coastal villages in Britain, carrying off and enslaving men, women, and children.
"The Tenth Gift" has parallel story lines, one centering on Catherine Ann Tregenna, "Cat," a 17th-century Cornish servant girl with a remarkable talent for embroidery, the other on Julia Lovat, a contemporary craft-shop owner with a similar gift. As a parting token from her married lover, Michael, Julia receives a small book of embroidery patterns, "The Needle-Woman's Glorie," published in 1625. Inside, Julia discovers that the margins of its pages are covered with tiny writing, Cat's journal of her abduction. When the ruthless yet sensitive corsair captain is wounded in a battle with the Spanish, beautiful flame-haired Cat is plucked from the filthy hold of the ship and instructed to sew up his wounds. Suffice it to say that many nonmedical complications ensue.
Back in the 21st century, Julia travels to Morocco to investigate the authenticity of "The Needle-Woman's Glorie," with Michael in pursuit. He's come to realize that the book is extremely valuable and wants to reclaim it. Julia, meanwhile, has met Idriss, a Moroccan tour guide with a chiseled profile and a charming manner. Johnson pours her writing energy into the modern plot line but, inevitably, it isn't the equal of Cat's exotic tale. The author clearly has done a great deal of research and folds it smoothly, for the most part, into her narrative. The story also draws on Johnson's own love story. She writes in an author's note that the characters of both the corsair captain and Idriss are based on her husband, a Berber tribesman - sensitive but not ruthless - whom she met while researching this novel in a remote Moroccan village.
Diane White writes every month about new light and popular fiction.
